Oh, how these buttery yellow gerbera blooms capture and hold the sun within.
Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, gerberas are as devoted to the sun as their cousins are, drinking in morning light and storing it in the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Their centers (capitula) appear to be single flowers, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.
Little earthbound suns, gerbera dish out abundance like honey, and other garden flowers behind them are moved and uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying movement, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.
Now and then, all living creatures falter from time to time. The loss of my soulmate toward the end of last year, and the pandemic that has us all (or nearly all) sequestered indoors have me feeling more so than ever this time around. There are intervals when I mark current events in the great wide world and the paucity of light beyond my windows and despair, am restless, out of sorts and heartsick, have the feeling that I am out of the world or dwelling apart from it.
Then I remember how my native place loves the light in early summer, and I am moved by the thought to do a little blooming of my own within. In the words of Wendell Berry, I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought, I rest for a while in the grace of the world and am free. If only foolish beings like ourselves could take in light and store it as flowers do.
2 comments:
I think we have a grace given that many wild things miss...sharing through the words that evoke the images, the feelings. Thus you are appreciated as well as what you appreciate.
Such beautiful words. Thank you.
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